


Closing the Circle

by kattahj



Category: Real Genius (1985)
Genre: Developing Relationship, F/M, M/M, Multi, Polyamory Negotiations, Pre-OT3, more discussions about sex than portrayals of it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-12
Updated: 2020-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:22:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28031574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kattahj/pseuds/kattahj
Summary: At different points in time, Jordan thinks that they all should sleep together. She just needs to get the boys caught up to the idea.
Relationships: Jordan Cochran/Chris Knight, Jordan Cochran/Chris Knight/Mitch Taylor, Jordan Cochran/Mitch Taylor
Comments: 18
Kudos: 30
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Closing the Circle

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kimboo_york](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimboo_york/gifts).



> Thanks to my marvellous beta reader! I can't name you without revealing myself, but you know who you are!

Jordan slept with Chris Knight during her first semester at Pacific Tech.

Well, not _slept_. Jordan never slept. It was one of those things about her that people found unnerving, even though it was completely harmless and out of her control.

She engaged in sexual intercourse with him.

The first time she proposed it was in late September, after she had done a thorough observation of all the guys in her immediate vicinity and came to the conclusion that Chris was a safe, appealing, and above all, likely option.

When he stumbled into the lab with a cup of coffee at 10:30 AM one morning, just the two of them there, she told him, “I think we should have sex.”

Chris coughed a little. “What?”

“We should have sex. I have noticed that you seem to have sex with many girls. I would like to be one of them.”

“They’re not that… many… _now_?”

“Not now! We have work to do, and anyway, it would be uncomfortable and unhygienic. We could do it tonight, or any other night that would be convenient for you. You can choose the place, too, I’m not fussy. Well, a _little_ bit fussy, I wouldn’t like to do it _outside_ , or in a car, or anywhere too small or uncomfortable. Also, I wouldn’t like to do it in public – Not that I’ve ever seen you do it in public, but I know that some people like to do so, and I wanted to make _perfectly_ clear that I don’t. No offense if you do.”

“Jordan.” He put a hand on her wrist, and his tone was gentle. “This comes a bit out of nowhere. What’s going on?”

“I’m a young woman out on my own for the first time, and I would like to take the opportunity to have new experiences, sex included.”

“Oh, geez.” Chris shook his head slowly. “If this is your first time, you really shouldn’t waste it on a guy you don’t even like.”

“But I do like you! You’re always nice to me, and you _listen_ when I talk, which most people don’t because I talk a lot and very fast – but that’s because my thoughts are fast and if I slow down my speech I’ll never catch up with what I’m thinking – Anyway, I don’t subscribe to antiquated ideas of virginity, and I don’t think there’s any harm in trying something out just to see how it would work. You’re the _ideal_ candidate, because you can have sex with me without immediately wanting an emotional connection that I’m not prepared to _promise_ at this point, while at the same time I trust you to take good care of me, and you’re not intimidated by me, which many boys are.”

“Boys are idiots.”

“So that’s a yes?”

“No. Because someday you could meet a guy you’re really into, and then you’d really regret this.”

She pondered that. “If that happens, I don’t think it would be so terrible to have a bit of experience.”

He laughed a little and shook his head ruefully. “Listen, Jordan, I’m flattered, but this isn’t something you should decide on a whim. Take some time to think about what you really want.”

“I have thought…” she started, but at that point, Professor Hathaway and Ikagami entered the room, and Chris got up to talk to them.

Jordan wasn’t certain if Chris genuinely wanted her to give the matter more thought, or if he just wanted to let her down easy. Perhaps it was safest to assume the latter.

* * *

They didn’t raise the issue again until the Christmas party. While in theory, Jordan wasn’t supposed to be drinking alcohol, she soon discovered that nobody cared, and helped herself to an eggnog martini.

It was not, she discovered, a very good drink, but she dutifully took sips of it anyway, and perhaps it was the reason why she got into a conversation about the development of the X-20 Dyna-Soar with a freshman boy she only knew by sight. He listened to her for ten minutes before his eyes glazed over; then he drained his drink, mumbled something inaudible and vanished into the crowd.

After a while, Chris came to sit down next to her instead. “Hi. Are you having fun?”

“Moderately.” His smile made her smile too, and she told him, “I still think we should have sex.”

“Oh, wow.”

“I understand if you don’t _want_ to, but if so, I would prefer if you told me outright. Don’t worry, I won’t be offended! It’s just that when you phrase it as concern for _me_ , I’m not sure whether I should go by what _I_ want or by what _you_ want, because I know what I want but not what you want....”

“How much have you had to drink?” he asked bluntly.

“Just this.” She frowned at her glass. “I don’t like it very much.”

He took the glass from her hand and tasted the drink, licking his lips thoughtfully.

“Yeah, okay,” he said after a while. “You’re not pickled, at least. Are you sure about this?”

“Are you?”

That got her a half smirk in reply. After a moment, he stood up and held out his hand. “All right. But you have to promise me you’ll let me know if you get any doubts, or you want to call it quits. Doesn’t matter how far along we are. Deal?”

“Of course,” she said, taking his hand. “Same to you.”

“Good. My room okay? It’s not the tidiest, but my room-mate is out and I can change the bedsheets.”

“Sounds perfectly adequate.” A thought struck her. “Do you have condoms? Because I would prefer to use them.”

He stopped short and spun around to glare at her. “You would not _prefer_. You should absolutely _demand_ condoms, and not just from guys who play for both teams. Jesus, Jordan, I’m starting to think it was lucky you came to me!”

“I didn’t have you pegged as so responsible,” she said, touched.

“Pranks are one thing. Risking your life is quite another.”

“Noted.”

Chris’s room turned out to be quite messy, but then, so was Jordan’s, so she didn’t mind. The bed looked fine to her. Since she mostly used her own to store books, she never bothered with bedsheets, but his didn’t look dirty at all. He still tossed them in the laundry and put on different ones, and as she lay down on them, she had to admit that the crisp, clean touch of cotton felt nice against her bare arms.

Chris kissed her gently as he started easing her stockings down, and she returned the kiss, a shiver running down her spine. She wondered if this was what it would feel like the whole time, like soda fresh from the fridge running through her veins. Would it hurt? Sometimes it hurt, she knew that much. Or perhaps she wouldn’t know what to do.

As it turned out, she did.

And it didn’t hurt at all.

It was lovely.

* * *

When Mitch joined the school, he was even younger and more lost than Jordan had been, and she felt an immediate affinity with him for that reason. He was also kind, and cute, and a really good listener, all of which were important positives in Jordan’s book.

The first time he asked her out, he was stammering and backtracking so badly that she figured out what he wanted long before he got to the point, but she thought that the polite thing to do was to wait for him to finish, and so that was what she did.

Once he got to “...go out with me sometime?” she replied:

“Yes, of course! Is this Saturday good for you? I’m free after eight. Unless you want to go earlier in the day, in which case Sunday is better – though some places are closed on Sundays. Restaurants are open, though, were you thinking of a restaurant? Nothing _fancy_ , of course, it’s not a special occasion. Or a movie theater, they will be open too, but that depends on whether or not there are any good films showing. I don’t go to the movies often, so I’m afraid I don’t know what’s playing. Do you have a genre preference? Another alternative is bowling – I’m not very _good_ at bowling, but bowling alleys usually have food, so that way we could spend the whole night in one place, which might be preferable. Of course, taking a walk could _also_ be nice, but that rather depends on the weather. We should check the weather for this weekend.”

Mitch smiled. “A movie on Sunday sounds good. I don’t have a genre preference.”

So they went to see Beverly Hills Cop, and halfway through the film, he took her hand.

The weekend after, he kissed her in a bowling alley.

By the time they saw The Breakfast Club, they were necking in the back row and didn’t even care.

It didn’t take much longer after that before she asked, “Do you want to take it further?”

His ears grew red. “I would like that, but… it’s… it would be… my first time.”

“Oh! That’s okay. It’s not very hard, I’ll show you how.”

“So… not your first time.”

“No. Is that alright?” She wasn’t sure what to do if he said no. Since she didn’t regret her past, she couldn’t very well apologize for it.

“Yes, of course! Just… have you had… a lot of guys?”

“Oh, no! No, I’m not an expert or anything. Still a novice, more or less.”

“Okay.” That seemed to calm his nerves a little, and he smiled. “We’ll figure it out together, then.”

“Sounds great!” she said warmly.

And they did.

* * *

A bunch of them had been sitting in Mitch and Chris’s dorm room, watching footage from Expo 85, and after the others left, Jordan remained with the two of them, finishing up the last of the potato chips.

Jordan sat on a pile of pillows, contemplating Korean computer products. She thought of a hundred video monitors combining into different patterns like a kaleidoscope, colors bursting behind her eyelids.

When she looked up, the boys were smiling at her.

“What?” she asked.

“I thought you said you never sleep,” Mitch said.

“I don’t.”

“You did.”

“No! I was just thinking!”

“Thinking about what?” Chris teased. “The best way to saw logs?”

She tossed a pillow at his face, but he caught it. “I don’t sleep!”

“Oh, come on, Jordan! Sure, you don’t sleep for long, but _never_ sleeping? You know that’s not even possible, right? Have you just been taking catnaps for nineteen years and not even realized what you were doing?”

Jordan had to steady herself with a hand against the bed frame, even though she was sitting down. “You’re lying to me! Both of you!”

“Honestly, we’re not!” Mitch said, wide-eyed.

“This isn’t even the first time I’ve seen you sleep,” Chris said. “You were sleeping for at least half an hour after we…” He bit off the end of the sentence, a little too late.

Mitch frowned. “After you what?”

“Nothing.”

“We had sex,” Jordan told him. “Once, two years ago. I was curious, Chris showed me some tricks. It’s no big deal.”

“Chris showed you tricks?” Mitch asked, voice a tad higher pitched than usual. “What, tricks that you’ve been doing with me?”

Chris sighed. “I told you this would get weird.”

“It’s not weird,” Jordan said firmly, and turned to Mitch. “Right? It’s not weird.”

“No,” Mitch said. “Of course not.”

But his eyes didn’t leave Chris for the rest of the night.

* * *

Jordan was lying in bed, curled up against Mitch’s side, when he asked her:

“So, what was it like, with Chris?”

She contemplated how to answer that. “I don’t think I should tell you. I wouldn’t want either of you to tell _other_ people what it’s like sleeping with me, after all.”

“Yeah, but… the things you did… are those things we could do? Together?”

“Okay, now it’s weird,” she said, disentangling herself from him to lie down on her back.

“No!” He reached out for her. “No, please, just, could you show me?”

“Are you jealous? Because you don’t have to be jealous. It was two _years_ ago, and it’s not like I was in _love_ with him. I wanted to have sex, he was someone I thought I might like to have sex with, and I did, and that’s all.”

His hand trailed down the side of her breast. “I keep imagining it, and I don’t know if what I’m imagining is real.”

The touch alone was enough to send her pulse racing, but she couldn’t help feeling a little bit tempted. Maybe it was a bad decision, but after some thought, she said, “Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll do some stuff with you, and some of it might be stuff I’ve previously done with Chris, but I won’t tell you _which_. Deal?”

“Deal,” he said, satisfied.

It _was_ weird, she decided as they proceeded to have sex with more fervour and joy than ever before. It was definitely weird, but she couldn’t pinpoint exactly _how_ it was weird.

Not until a few days later, when she watched Chris and Mitch talking in the corridor, Chris cracking jokes and Mitch laughing, with a bashful glow to his face.

When Chris went off to fetch his notes on the latest lecture, Jordan took Mitch’s arm.

“Now I get it! You’re not jealous of him, you’re jealous of me!”

Mitch’s face grew even pinker. “What?”

“You’re into Chris! That makes so much more sense. All those things you wanted me to do, they were so that you could feel the proximity to him through me!”

“I… that’s… I love you!”

“I love you too,” she said simply. “But.” With that, she gestured towards the closed door.

Mitch looked down, shuffled his feet, and ultimately admitted, “Maybe.”

Was there a proper way to handle your boyfriend’s crush on your ex-hookup? Jordan settled for the most logical one she could find. “You should have sex with him.”

“Jordan!”

“Well, think about it! _I’ve_ had sex with him, and I’m having sex with _you_ , and if you have sex with _him_ we would close the circle and you wouldn’t have to wonder about it anymore. You have my permission, so it isn’t cheating, and he’s totally into guys!”

“He is?”

There was a hopeful note in Mitch’s voice that made her take his hand and drag him into the dorm room.

“Hey, Chris, you’re into guys, right?” she asked.

Chris was busy rummaging about in one of his desk drawers. “Among other things, sure.”

“Is Mitch the kind of guy you would want to sleep with?”

That did make Chris look up, and he slowly closed the drawer as he took in the sight of the two of them. “What are you doing?”

“I’m just asking. Is he your type?”

“Cochran, are you pimping out your boyfriend to me?”

Mitch squirmed at the word.

“Not exactly,” Jordan said.

“Uh-huh. You can’t do that. First of all, it doesn’t seem like he's up to it.”

“Oh, but…” She turned to look at Mitch, who was by now beet red. “You are, though, aren’t you?”

“This wasn’t my idea, I swear!” Mitch pleaded to Chris.

“I didn’t think it was.” Chris stood up and walked over to them, shaking his head. “Jordan. You’ve got to learn to take it down a notch with other people’s emotions. Okay? Mitch is sixteen years old. It’s not going to happen. No offense, Mitch.”

“I was seventeen when you slept with me!” Jordan protested

“And that was two years ago! He’s way too young for me. Sorry, Mitch.”

“It’s okay, I… Can we just leave?”

Mitch dragged Jordan out of the room, and she was startled to find tears in his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I really thought he’d go for it.”

“Can we please never talk about this again?” Mitch asked, in a tear-choked voice.

And so they didn’t. If there was a certain wistfulness about their intimacy from that moment, it got easier with time to ignore, and eventually it went away altogether.

* * *

At the turn of the decade, Jordan and Mitch were at a massive party in DC, where the scientific community got together to celebrate the New Year, discuss ways to spend the next year’s funding, and get hammered.

The evening had just moved on from the dinner and conversation part to the drinking and dancing part, when Jordan heard a familiar voice say:

“Hey, you two!”

“Chris!”

She hugged him happily, and Mitch did the same, in that awkward way men had.

Chris was wearing a nicer suit than she’d ever seen on him before, but apart from that, he looked much the same.

“So, how have you been?” he asked, but didn’t quite seem to hear her long-winded answer, over the music blasting through the amps. Halfway through, he waved for them to come along to the wardrobe, and they all took their coats and stepped out on the nearest balcony.

“...the next step in the development of space shuttle technology,” Jordan concluded. “Sorry, did you hear any of that? Should I say it again?”

“No need,” Chris said, grinning.

“What about you?” Mitch asked. “What are you doing these days?”

“Oh, freelance stuff. I want to make sure I work with people I can trust, you know?”

“Yeah.”

They all fell silent, remembering how close they’d come to creating a weapon of mass destruction.

“So,” Chris said, nodding towards Jordan’s finger. “Is that a ring I see?”

“Yes!” She wiggled her finger. “Do you like it? It’s vintage. That seemed to be the easiest way to avoid supporting unethical mining practices. We picked it out together in the shop. I know it’s _traditional_ for the man to buy the ring and surprise the woman with it, but we discussed getting married beforehand, so it seemed ridiculous to _pretend_ that I would be surprised, and this way we could make _sure_ that the ring would suit me. Which I really think it does, don’t you?”

“It does,” he said. “Have you set a date?”

“First of May. There’s no need to hurry, and it’s so much _nicer_ to do it in spring, unless of course it’s raining, but it could rain at any date so there’s just no way to avoid it for sure, except to get married _right away_ and we didn’t want to do that.”

Chris’s mouth twitched in the beginnings of a smile. “Am I invited?”

“We haven’t sent any invitations yet,” Jordan said, at the same time as Mitch said, “Yes! Of course.”

“We will invite you!” Jordan said. “In February. Or possibly early March, but February seems safer, doesn’t it? We want _everyone_ to find time to come. Of course, you have a head start now.”

“I do.” Chris shook his head ruefully. “Wow, just a few minutes ago, when you were talking about the space shuttles, it felt like nothing had changed, like we were all just college kids. But it’s been so long, hasn’t it?”

“It has,” Jordan said, and in a fit of devilry, added, “Mitch is _all grown up_ now.”

After a beat, Chris chuckled. “Pimping out your boyfriend to me again?”

“Fiancé, now,” Jordan pointed out,

Mitch rolled his eyes and sighed. “All right, fine. I had a crush on you. I was sixteen, and you were the coolest guy I had ever met in my life.”

“That’s incredibly flattering.” Chris took a sip of his drink and made a wry face, whether at the taste of the drink or the confession was hard to tell. “I’m afraid all I was thinking was, put him back in the water, he’ll grow up fine someday.”

“Yeah. I figured.”

“And I was right. You did.”

Mitch looked up, and Chris held his gaze.

“Ohhh!” Jordan said, leaning back against the railing. “Not so outrageous now, is it?”

“Jordan,” Mitch said, eyes still on Chris, “I love you dearly, but maybe you could step inside for a minute?”

Meaning he didn’t want her motormouth interfering with whatever he was going to say next. She grinned. “Very well, I’ll go freshen up.”

The warmth of several hundred people hit her like a wall when she left the balcony, and the contrast from the temperature outside made her shiver. She navigated through the crowd to the bathroom, figuring she might as well use it for more than the metaphor. Having done that, she replaced her drink with a new one, and checked her watch. Eight minutes. She should give them at least a few more, and so she endured the entire “Final Countdown”, subpar audience participation and all, before returning outside.

Mitch and Chris were standing in much the same position as before, and she raised her eyebrows.

“Well? Have you reached a decision?”

“I’ll be coming for dinner tomorrow,” Chris said. “And now I really should talk to some potential investors.”

He gave her a brief but cordial hug and reached for the door.

“Only dinner?” she asked.

The wicked grin he gave her was 100% college Chris. “It’s just the first date, Cochran. Don’t be greedy.”

“Oh!” She liked the sound of that. It had been a long time before she’d last been on a first date, and she hadn’t expected to ever be on one again. The fact that she’d be doing it with Mitch by her side made it even better, and she put her arm around her financé’s waist, squeezing it gently in gratitude. Mitch smiled, and put his hand on hers.

Before Chris could leave, she called to him: “Wait! Come join us for the stroke of midnight?”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” he said, blowing them a kiss.


End file.
